Dirty Walls

It was just a nightmare. I didn’t actually see any of my family last night

I stood up, and dragged my feet toward my door. I turned on the light, then opened the door. Rubbing my eyes, I stepped out into my hall. Everything was in place. What a vivid nightmare.

I trudged my way to my bathroom. I rubbed my eyes again, then pulled open my door and walked in. I looked around. I wasn’t actually in my bathroom.

I was staring into a room filled with corpse after corpse, all of them being plagued with a condition I was all too familiar with.

Every corpse in that room had died of starvation. I could see it in their sunken eyes, and in the way that their skin barely clung to their bones. My eyes watched, forcing me to bear witness to all of the dead, before my stomach caught up and I vomited. I had seen many corpses before, but I was rather sensitive to starved ones.

I shut the door, and continued to dry heave in the hallway.

After regaining control of my breath, I pissed on the wall. I still needed to go. It was high-time I take some real action, and tried to do something about my situation. I looked into my kitchen. It still looked exactly as it should. I guess I’d just have to stop using my bathroom, and maybe my bedroom as well. I should get breakfast and see if someone will let me stay with them.

I stepped toward my fridge, feeling much more awake and alert at this point. Because of that, I noticed a note stuck to the freezer door. It was certainly out of place, to say the least. I tore it off, and looked at it.

Hope you like the food I left for you

~<3 Mom

I was no longer on board to open any sort of door in my house. Cupboards, rooms, closets, even my toilet lid, if it ever decided to show itself again.

I sat at my kitchen island, and dropped my head onto it. “Maybe now would be a good time to leave.” With that, I stood up, and walked briskly to my front door. I prayed that there wouldn’t be anything wrong with my only real exit. Damn this concrete box I live in.

I put my hand onto the doorknob, and took a deep breath. Please don’t jinx anything.

I squoze my eyes shut, twisted the knob, then shoved the door forward. I tensed up my muscles, hoping that I would feel a breeze, or some sunlight, or even a gunshot at this point.

There was nothing. I didn’t see anything past my eyelids, I didn’t hear anything, and I didn’t feel anything slide past my skin. I felt weak. I felt sick.

I let my eyes open, looking at my feet, then slowly panned up. There was another room where a street should have been. It had some cracked cabinets and shattered shelves tossed around on the walls, and crumbling counters dotting the middle. Scrambling on everything were cockroaches. It might have looked like a lab, except for its disrepair and pestilence.

“waaaaaaah…” I heard the subtle cry of a child. It was an infant! I stumbled into the lab type room. The door shut behind me, as I had expected. That didn’t matter at this point, those ghosts of my family had taken a baby!

I stopped to try and listen to the crying, so that I could find the child. The crying had stopped. The only sound was of cockroaches scuttling. I was standing in a broken and empty room.

“SHIT!” I ran back toward the door, and flung it open. It fell off of its hinges, and revealed my home’s main hallway once again. I was boxed into my house.

“What the fuck…” I stared into my home. I didn’t know what to make of anything that I had been faced with.

My feet sputtered toward my kitchen again. I needed a drink. I only hoped that I had some running water.

Leaning against walls, I pushed myself toward the sink. I was glad it was near my door. I placed my hands on the counter before it, and weakly forced my hand to turn the ‘cold’ handle.

Nothing came out for a second. That’s okay my sink usually doesn’t release water for a second. Right? Shit, I don’t remember.

Then, some dust puffed out of the faucet and into the air, before a single spider let its legs climb from the faucet, and used them to pull its body out. It climbed on top of the faucet, and stared at me with its many eyes. It was a dingy grey color, and lacked any hairs.

“What do you want?” I glared back at the spider. Its mandibles shifted around for moment, but it made no effort to move. It simply watched me with its beady eyes. I wasn’t usually afraid of spiders, but I didn’t want to touch this one.

If there wasn’t any water in my sink, I figured I might have a bottle or two in my fridge. I needed to do something quick, as the edges of my vision were beginning to become spotted.

Still leaning on the countertop, I used both my arms and legs alike to move myself toward the fridge. I slipped my hand into the handle, then pulled it open. This was when I remember the note that had been left.

There were only two items in my now shelfless refrigerator: a jar with a brain, and a pitcher of blood. I’d recognise blood anywhere. This was what she expected me to eat.

I knew that drinking human blood could kill me. At least, if I drank too much of it. This pitcher definitely counted as too much. A brain, I wasn’t so sure about. Considering how important the brain is, I’d like to imagine it’d be nutrient rich. I’m not a doctor.

I reached into the white box, and dragged the jar across the shelf. I couldn’t lift it, so it fell off of the shelf and shattered on the floor. I loosely swept glass shards away with my feet. I sat down, and let my hands reach for the brain. They picked it up, and pieces of it sloshed back to the ground. The brain got pulled toward my face, and I willingly took a bite of it. It tasted like metal, except it was made of flesh. I chewed slowly, then let the ruined matter float down my gullet.

I gazed at the brain. What did I just do? I didn’t just… Oh god.

I might have vomited, but my body had given up on resisting this nightmare. As if by reflex, I threw the brain straight at a wall. I stood up, no longer feeling sick or weak. Did the brain do this, or am I hopped up on adrenaline?

I closed the door to the fridge, and stepped away from the kitchen. Maybe there was something wrong with every room in the house, seeing as how my bathroom was filled with corpses, and my kitchen held blood and a brain.

I turned to go back toward the hallway, and remembered the spider. My kitchen also revealed a spider. I looked at the sink, trying to find the watchful spider. It wasn’t on the faucet. I looked around, failing to see it on the floor or counters. I looked up, and saw it standing on the ceiling, with eyes tracking me ever so vigilantly. I wish I had killed it when it was sitting on my faucet.

I stepped into the hallway again. I had four more rooms I could look into. Although, I could also look more into the room that led “outside.”

I didn’t really have a lot of time. I didn’t know how long this adrenaline would last. I chose to look into my bedroom next, because I had woken up in there, and nothing seemed out of place at the time.

I got to my room without any issues in the hall. Yet, everything in my room was still in place. Nothing had been moved or touched since I had last been in there. However, my photo of my sister was facing the ground. That wasn’t right at all. I always stood it up before I would go to sleep. Maybe the terror made me forget.

I took a few steps into the room, then bent down and picked the picture frame up. I looked at the photo inside. Nothing was out of place within the photo, besides a cockroach climbing out of the back of the frame. I didn’t know how it fit its body through the small space, but that was the least of my concerns.

I turned around and looked up. The spider was still staring at me, and held its body close to the ceiling. The stark black eyes were only slightly discernible from its grey body.

I put the photo back down, ignoring the second and third cockroach climbing from it. I swiveled around, and left the room, trying my best to ignore the spider.

All of my other rooms are rather barren, and wouldn’t be very hard to examine for misplacements. I chose to study the smallest of them first, and made my way down to my closet.

With another amount of flawless steps, I was standing before my closet. I opened it up, and numerous moths flew out. Once they were out of the way, I got a look inside. All of the walls were covered in moth cocoons. Fragile moth cocoons, holding the sludge that caterpillars became as they metamorphosed.

My sister loved butterflies, and I can’t imagine that she would hate moths. Because of her, I would normally admire something like this, but the dingy brown colors covering my walls and coat wasn’t enjoyable in this context. I shut the door, and slunk away.

I saw my vision begin fading again. I panicked, and ran back into my kitchen. I looked toward the wall where I threw the brain, to find only the blood stain remaining, and all of the brain gone.

I thrust myself toward my refrigerator, and tore the door open. That door flew into the opposite wall. I greedily grabbed the pitcher of blood, and guzzled the ruby nectar as quickly as possible without choking. After three breaks, the pitcher was empty. I had drunk at least a gallon of blood.

Yet, despite the typical negative results, I felt stronger than before. I felt as if I could punch my way through the windowless walls. Not like I really would, however.

I had two rooms left. My front room and…

I was going to investigate my front room next. It seemed like the best choice to me.

Now the hallways had finally decided to join in on the game the other rooms were playing. There were numerous amounts of mirrors hung up on the walls. Not enough to disorient and confuse me, but enough to make the red covering my face rather apparent.

The first mirror I saw was enough to sober me up, and I hung my head in shame. I stared at my feet while hurrying to the living room.

Inside the living room was a large spider web, with a few giant bundles of webs scattered around. The bundles had humanoid shapes. I really didn’t want to think about that.

This new spider web reminded me of the companion who had started following me from the kitchen. I looked up, hoping to see him, or her. It.

I wasn’t disappointed. The spider was still following me, but it had grown an amount larger. Initially, I could have killed it with my bare hands, but now it was larger than either of my hands. Maybe even both. The sickly grey creature sauntered across the ceiling, before using its spinneret to lower itself onto the web encompassing the room.

This was when I noticed one bundle sitting squarely in the center of the room. The spider was sitting on top of it, and grew steadily. Once it had grown to be the size of my torso, it sunk one of its elongated limbs deep into the web, where it eventually broke through to the other side.

The Spider lifted the opposite leg, and lightly slipped off the webbing. Inside was another starved corpse. The Spider turned the emaciated corpse toward me, forcing its empty and sunken eye sockets to stare into mine.

I turned away from the door, slammed my eyes closed, and vomited. I can’t believe I let myself watch the Spider with such morbid curiosity for so long. Opening my eyes, I saw the floor in front of my unshut mouth was covered in red. I vomited again, this time seeing the ochre bile leave my mouth.

I hurtled away from the front room. My bedroom should be safe from whatever monstrosities the Spider wants to reveal to me. I made my best effort to avoid looking into any mirrors while I sped.

My room door had been shut in between the time that I had left it and now. I crashed into the door, opening it and falling into the room.

Within a matter of moments, I was covered in cockroaches.

“AAAHH!” I scrambled to my feet, screaming and wiping the vile things off of my body. They started pouring out of the door, climbing over my feet and out. I took a few breaths, and steeled myself. These cockroaches weren’t a big deal.

I looked into my room. All of my walls and ceiling were covered in cockroaches. They had made a shrine in the center of the room, made up of more cockroach bodies. On top of it was my photo, with more cockroaches continuing to climb out. The photo shifted in place atop the writhing cockroaches.

I turned around and shuddered. That was when I saw it again.

Blue.

It rushed into my sister’s room, and I feebly followed. I had regained the tunnel vision that I had worked to avoid.

Cockroaches continued to rush out of the bedroom and slide about my feet. However, they left a small radius empty around my sister’s bedroom. I stepped into the empty space. I placed my hand on the knob, and the door slowly slid to an open position.

I stepped into the room. It glowed with a light blue color, and flowers lined every wall. All of them released the blue tint. Scattered on the ceilings and walls were more of the moth cocoons. In the center of the room was the apparition of Syf once again. She sat on her knees.

“So you came back.” She held a moth in her hands.

“I guess I did,” I whispered to her from the door.

“Mother and Father haven’t been very nice to you. I told them they wouldn’t have to be so rude. They didn’t listen to me. They said that a child wouldn’t know how to handle adult things.” She stroked the moth with one hand.

I stumbled into the room towards her. “I didn’t see either of them. What are you talking about?” My voice was still frail, but it managed to carry in the room.

“That’s okay. I’m here for you now.” Her voice echoed loudly. “You don’t have to worry about either of them now.” She lifted her hand up, and the moth flew away. She stood up, and opened her arms to me.

“Come here. I’ll take the pain away, big brother.” Her voice sounded more mature than it had before. This was when I finally noticed the thin dress she wore. It revealed her shoulders, and the bottom of it only reached halfway down her thighs, leaving the rest of her legs open.

I felt the tunnel in my vision begin to widen at the same rate that my vision blurred. Tears were welling in my eyes.

“You are crying?” My sister gave me a puzzled look, and cocked her head to the side.

“Come here. I wish to hold you, and make you feel better.” She stayed where she was.

I staggered toward her. I managed to take two steps before tripping and falling into her arms. She held me, then moved down to her knees again, with me in her arms.

“Be quiet, big brother. Soon you’ll be with the moths.” With that, she placed her hands on my neck. My eyes widened, and I tried to slip away.

“Be still, big brother. This will only hurt for a moment, and then you will be among the moths.” She tightened her grip.

I felt a sharp sting in my neck, then darkness quickly rushed over my vision.